Aug 25, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Social media is a jungle, full of vegetation that limits the view, poisionous flowers that look beautiful at first glance, small areas of bright sunlight that somehow finds its way through the foliage, nasty surprises of many types, and gems that can change your life.
Those who know the jungle can pick the nasties from the goodies with little more than a glance, when the reluctant wanderer can barely see any difference, and they seem to be able to find their way effortlessly through the undergrowth whilst we flounder.
That is the nature of our environment, get used to it.
There are many blogs out there that offer information, insight, and advice, use them. Jay Baer’s convince and convert, Mike Stelzner’s Social Media Examiner, and Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation, Jeff Bullas, being four of the best. All offer advice, insight and opinion via a range of means, and will throw a bit of light into the dark corners.
A client asked me recently why he should bother spending the time and money (it is not cheap, it just costs differently to the stuff on the P&L) on social media, and my answer was simple: “that is where your customers are!”
Aug 22, 2012 | Branding, Change, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
People are always looking for answers in their lives, whilst mostly not being in a position to frame the question sufficiently to enable a search as specific as one on Google. It is a factor in our lives that contributes to the context in which we live where we go, who we interact with, what we buy and where, what we think of our jobs, partners, and future for our kids.
It is not too much of a stretch to think that a picture of these things can be built over time by a personalised version of the search and browse capabilities now available to us. It has been called the semantic web, web 3.0, and a bunch of other things, but it is really a bank of information about us, evolved by emerging AI that reflects out lives.
Imagine you were walking down a street, near a car dealership with a new French model, your semantic web planted in your device knows you like French wine, your current car is due to be changed, you favor sweeping lines in design, your kids have left home, so there is some money in the bank, you always hankered for sporty, a bit “left field” experiences, and you have a bit of time before the appointment that brings you to this location. Bingo, a personalised invitation for a cup of coffee, and a chat about the new model comes to you from someone in the dealership vaguely linked to you via a social network.
It is only a small jump away from where we are now, but changes the way the marketing process will work.
Aug 16, 2012 | Branding, Innovation, Management, Marketing
The decades of growth up till a couple of years ago, and the recognition of the key nature of a robust marketing input to corporate success has left many organisations, particularly brand heavy consumer organisations with a marketing overhead problem as times change.
They have a structure that is often 5 layers from the CMO to the assistant brand manager, organised along brand lines, and recently supplemented with category analysts, social media experts, and other service roles. All this at a time when consumer brands are under huge threat from retailer owned brands, global marketing, fragile demand, the erosion of the ability to differentiate by the ubiquity of information, and agile low cost competitors.
Just getting rid of every third head makes little sense, all you do is lose corporate memory, so you need to reorganise to deliver productivity from the investment in marketing overhead, although inevitably there will be personnel losses. Three questions to consider:
- Is marketing activity aligned to corporate priorities?. Many times I have seen lower levels in marketing departments beavering away at projects that bear little resemblance to the strategic priorities held in the corner office.
- Are project portfolios run alongside brand initiatives to ensure that the silos that evolve when brand groups are relatively autonomous are removed?.
- Have you made the hard choices about what projects will proceed, and which will be relegated to the car-park?. This is sometimes very hard, but is a crucial circuit breaker for innovation, with the caveat that those projects left are appropriately resourced.
This is not easy stuff, and most fail the test, which results in sub-optimal resource allocation decisions.
Jul 27, 2012 | Customers, Marketing
A Verb, a word that is something that describes an action, like work, run, achieve, but often, unfortunately when marketing is the topic of conversation, words such as complicate, confuse, dodge, unmeasurable, and such can be added.
Seth Godin sees marketing as a series of concentric circles, the closer to the centre, the more objective and product benefit focused the language becomes, and it is a very simple, but insightful way of looking at it.
Successful businesses in the future will see the practice of marketing take on a few common characteristics that have the action aspects of the verb:
- Measurable
- Accountable
- Customer centric
- Transparent
- Motivating
- Innovative
- All encompassing
- Engaged
What have I missed?
Jul 25, 2012 | Marketing, Sales, Social Media
Sales people are used to being measured by hard metrics, and management is very used to imposing and managing these metrics, and marketers are more inclined now than just a while ago, to have quantifiable measures.
Therein lies one of the challenges of social media.
To varying degrees, SM is not a great sales tool, but it is a great tool to build engagement, and engagement leads to sales, eventually, and amongst other outcomes. It can take the place of the face to face selling, and potentially much of the role of traditional advertising.
When on the web, searching for information, peoples bullshit meter is working, so their receptiveness to advertising may be no greater than in a normal mass media environment, the huge difference being the ability of web advertising to target information at those looking for it. However, on social media, I contend that the bullshit meter is at a lower level, perhaps turned off, as they are seeking to engage, not just seeking information, so information accepted takes on some of the characteristics of endorsement.
